Parts is parts. Parts is pieces.

Moving to GJ has really let us get out more. One downside we are discovering is that we are breaking more bike things than ever before. By that I mean more THIS SPRING than in the past 5 years! We also seem to be particularly hard on hubs. Here's a sampling.

First was our tandem rear hub. We were riding with some friends from Denver when suddenly pedaling no longer moved the bike forward. Looking inside the hub showed this:

You can see the deformed metal where the little cylindrical piece is. That is where the pawls seat into the freehub. Years of grinding up steep hills had damaged where they seat. It also damaged them!

The one on the right has the most normal shape, except it should still be connected to the little cylindrical part in Picture #1. All the pawls had snapped, probably not at the same time - first one then when the stress of contact was spread over two instead of three, it overloaded another one. The last survivor (my guess is the really bent one) held on until it couldn't take it any more. Both of these are easily replaceable, but sadly the drive ring (toothy part) that is screwed into the hub shell was cracked (about 9 o'clock in the photo). This part is really hard to replace.


Shortly after getting a new hub for the tandem, we were riding with friends from Denver (again!) when something went wrong while climbing. Looking back we saw that our rear derailleur had broken.

This usually happens when a stick gets caught somewhere in it, but we don't have many sticks so it just decided to fall off.

Next was my single bike. First a bearing went out in my bottom bracket. Not catastrophic, but moderately costly to replace. Then came my rear hub. We were in Durango riding with friends (we have to stop doing this, it's killing our bikes!) and during a short, hard climb my pedals started slipping forward whenever I tried to put pressure on them. In this case the drive ring which is threaded into the hub shell (similar to the tandem design) had stripped out the threads and now could spin around inside the hub. Also not fixable.


Now it was Heather's turn! Heather is really not hard on parts. In fact we make jokes about the one time she actually wore out a tire. Anyhow, I was cleaning her bike when I noticed that when the rear wheel was spinning, the rear cassette tried to rotate as well. It should just sit there if the chain is on. I thought that it might have just gotten really dirty since I have never actually cleaned anything in there. When I pulled off the cassette I found some fishing line wrapped around the freehub body. As I pulled out a few feet of line, I could tell that it had gotten down around the axle as well. Since I don't have those tools, and because I though the Bike Shop employees would get a kick out of it, I took it in to the shop. The next day it was all fixed and they gave me this:

They were surprised and amused. And made several comments about getting Shimano fishing products confused with Shimano biking products.

That's where we are at now. I ordered a new wheelset for my bike since I have long suspected that I am a bit too heavy and clumsy for the really light one I had. Then ordered a new hub for the light (broken) set and will put it on Heather's bike to let her try to break it. Hopefully we can get everything going by next weekend as we hope to camping in Crested Butte as a scouting trip for when SCAQ are here.

New Trail: good ride, lousy name.

Well, in trying to keep with our"get out and go" Summer, we are WAY behind on posts. Two weekends ago we decided to stay in town and try to put our house back in order as well as riding some local trails. We wanted to do some single bike riding to let Heather remember how to steer and to try out her new, more aggressive tires. We decided to ride a trail I had just found out about a few weeks back. The trail is known by the unfortunate title of "Butterkinfe". This supposedly derives from an incident in which a person out on the trail got lost and was in great peril. he only way he found his direction was by discovering a butterknife that he had dropped on the way in. As I said - lousy name. Anyhow, this trail is about 15 minutes from our house but feels considerably more remote when riding it.




The trail is a multi-access trail, which means motorcycles allowed. The good part is that it means the trail is kept clear by more use than some bike/hike trails. It also means that most of the obstacles were designed to be achievable by motorcycles (less sharp drop-offs and steps, more steep angled rocks).

(Forgive the blurring on the right hand side of the pictures, the lens was dirty.)



In this one you can see the rain clouds gathering - more on that in a moment.

Here's some of the rock obstacles. One thing about riding singles: I take more pictures!


Heather had her hands full on this trail as we haven't ridden something this rocky on singles in a while. There were also several narrow sections with sloping drop-offs beside them (Heather's favorite).

Now, back to the rain...In this one you see Heather trying to outrun the approaching storm.

Sadly, we did not out run the rain and got caught in about 20 min of downpour. One other odd thing about this trail is that you start on about 9 miles of downhill single track, followed by about 4 miles of jeep road climb to get back to the truck. The rain caught us on the way back up, and even worse, right as we got to a section of bentonite clay (nasty, sticky stuff when wet. It pretty much has to be chiseled off the bike once dry).

It clogs the tires, then the tire finally won't roll due to the clay building up so much that it blocks up the chainstays and fork. We had to go quite slow and Heather got hypothermic. Finally we did manage to get home and warm up (and eat!). I'm glad for this one that we weren't out camping as it was much easier to get a hot shower at home. After all of that, Heather did say she wanted to try it again some dry day.

A big camping trip

So Summer is here and Heather and I have committed ourselves to doing as many things as possible at every given opportunity. This means every weekend we are going to try to "do" something - big biking, trips, hikes, camping, etc. We basically get about six weekends to damage ourselves as much as possible until Shaun, Cindy, Quinn, and Abbey get here - then we try to damage all of the group!

Last weekend: CAMPING! We decided to drive the new, improved camping truck up to the Uncompaghre plateau for a weekend of camping, walking, and short bike rides. We chose a new area of the plateau which was farther south than our previous camps. Our general plan was to drive up to an area near the Roubideau trail and look for a spot. The drive up was on pavement, then smooth dirt then jeep road. It was uneventful except for Heather proclaiming that sitting in the front seat rather than the sideways-facing jump seat was a HUGE improvement for her. Also since we are in the middle of a very hot spell (102 in GJ on Saturday) the air-conditioning was a plus.
We arrived at the plateau around lunch so we pulled over and busted out the chairs and food:

Lunch (peanut butter and honey sandwiches) completed we moved on to our general destination and found a lovely campsite near the Roubideau Trail.

Hindsight told us that we should have looked for more shade as it was very sunny and hot even at +8,000 feet! The strange thing was that one or two weeks ago the whole area was probably still under snow.

We immediately set out on a series of walks short bike rides and creek play. We found a nice mountain stream about .5 miles from the tent, so we hooked up Cailan's trail-a-bike to my Chumba, Heather got on her Blur, and we rode the very bumpy jeep road down to the water. Cailan could (and would) play at a creek for several hours, so Heather and I took turns exploring the area with Utah.

We found lots of steep jeep roads and a pretty fun 3 mile loop to take turns riding. All that playing was hungry work so we headed back to cook up some angel hair pasta with pesto.

Then we took our traditional after dinner perambulation to see the evening sights.



We had an calm night which, given the fact that we had both Cailan AND Utah in the tent, was pretty amazing. The next morning Cailan actually said that he wanted to go for a walk! So we seized the moment.

Here you see Cailan and Heather having a "Dinosaur Hike". This is where Cailan picks a group of dinosaurs, then assigns each of us a specific dino, and we walk along pretending to be them.

You can see in this photo that we are three-fingered dinos. That would probably indicate either a group of Dromaeosaurs or Allosaurs. Suddenly, the dinos encountered some strange tracks!

Cailan has learned to identify deer, elk, and cow tracks - but not bear!
After that excitement we broke camp and drove off in search of more adventure. Our map showed some singletrack near a campground so we started towards the Iron Springs Campground. On the way we saw a lovely alpine snow-melt lake so we had a detour.

When we got near, we heard lots of noise coming from the lake - we must investigate!

I turns out that we had hit a big lekking season for the local frogs.

They were quite small but could make a tremendous amount of noise.

We then continued our little detour around the lake. This was not as easy as it might seem as there were several obstacles, including wetlands,



swamps,


and snow.

In the end we made it out after a great adventure!

After all of that we though we would have an uneventful couple of miles to the campground - but it was not to be. While we were at the lake I had noticed a cyclist going past. He was carrying enough gear that I thought he might be doing the Telluride to Moab San Juan Hut-to-hut trip which used the road we were driving on as part of it's route. Heather simply noted that he was going the wrong direction for that. As we drove to the campground we came up on the cyclist again, so I thought I would ask where he was going. He said: "from Mexico to Canada". This led to a delightful interlude where we towed him along for the two miles to the campground

and invited him to stop and eat. His name is Stefan (German) and this is his idea of a vacation. We broke out the food box and had lunch while we talked. You can see a bit of his journey at http://www.mtb-news.de/forum/showthread.php?t=460366&page=47
We also learned that he will eat just about anything, including the peanut butter-honey-grape sandwich he made. After all of this, we were finally at the campground and trail we had started out towards. During lunch Utah had gone wandering and come back wet and dirty, so we suspected that there was a water feature nearby. Heather and Cailan took off to explore that while I rode the "Aspen Trail": a motorcycle/biking/hiking trail of about 8 miles. It was a beautifully scenic loop trail that was unfortunately sandy and loose in many areas (sometimes happens on moto trails...). During the whole ride, I kept thinking that it would be better if I were doing the loop in the other direction, so when I rejoined H & C, I gave her directions to that effect. She assures me it was not that easy the other way either. We found an amazing "all uphill" loop!




We ended up not getting back to GJ until about 6:00pm so we dropped by Chipotle then went home and washed the whole family.

A good weekend - what's next?